Averno

Averno, a crater lake in southern Italy, was for the Romans the entrance to the underworld, both gateway and impassable barrier between the living and the dead. This collection shows Averno as the only source of heat and light in a world turned to icy winter. Both epic and intimate in scope, it explores the enduring drama of love and death. Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck’s new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds and an impassable barrier. The book proceeds as a sequence, an extended lamentation, its long restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resolution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage and grief-stricken.